ABSTRACT
Laura's administrative supervisors, the school's Executive Director and the Principal, and her more experienced colleagues suggested she not work on our first video project in the fall. Esperanza was a student-centered, constructivist charter school with mixed-age classrooms under the threat of closure (in the first and final years of this project). There were some of the tensions associated with dual immersion schools, but many efforts to ameliorate them, including the consistent use of two languages in all meetings and a concerted effort to talk about why which language was used in which context. The student body at Esperanza was 70 percent Latino/a, a category or label that hides the immense diversity of the Latino/a population in Southern California. Children's spoken narration and written text varied widely. Most children recorded directly what they had written, but some did ignore their written text and create a new narrative on the fly with the iPad in hand.
